From feudal fields to city streets, dung was far more than just waste—it was power, wealth, and the backbone of an entire economy
When we think about the forces that shaped medieval Britain, war, trade, and the growth of cities tend to dominate the conversation. But one of the most consequential — and least glamorous — drivers of the medieval economy was something far more humble: dung.
“Manure underpinned the medieval economy,” explains Dr. Richard Jones, professor of landscape history at the University of Leicester, speaking on the Toilets through time series from the HistoryExtra podcast.
A foundation of fertility
The bulk of medieval manure came from livestock, though farmers were resourceful in seeking out any available fertilizing material. In coastal regions, seaweed and sand were mixed with farmyard waste to enrich the soil. This wasn’t mere improvisation — it reflected a deep-rooted understanding that returning nutrients to the earth was essential to sustaining yields season after season.
Some historians go so far as to argue that manure was a key reason Europe rose to economic prominence during the medieval period. Unlike Asia, which had fewer large domesticated mammals, Europe was rich in cattle, sheep, and pigs—animals that not only provided food and labor but also generated fertilizer on a massive scale.
Dung and the feudal order
Manure wasn’t just an agricultural resource—it was embedded in the social fabric of feudal life. Peasants were commonly required to pen their animals on a lord’s fields, effectively transferring the fertilizing power of their herds to their landlord. While peasants could collect dung produced elsewhere, the lion’s share of this valuable commodity flowed upward through the feudal hierarchy.
The value of manure was such that it occasionally became the subject of legal disputes—court records contain cases of outright manure theft. There was even a moral distinction drawn between types of waste: “wholesome manure,” derived purely from animals, plants, or the lord’s own land, was considered superior to “tainted manure,” which included waste from peasant households.
Dung was typically stored in large heaps known as dunghills, which were prominent enough to serve as boundary markers in Anglo-Saxon land charters—some of the earliest documentary evidence of their existence.
What your dunghill said about you
Despite being owned mainly by lords, manure was culturally associated with the lower classes. The literary record—written almost exclusively by the educated elite—portrays dunghills in a consistently negative light, linked to filth, poverty, and even crime. Dunghills, it turns out, were occasionally used to conceal murder victims, making them symbols of both squalor and suspicion.
Yet for peasant communities, the picture was quite different. Living close to dung was simply a fact of life, and a large dunghill was something to be proud of. The size of one’s dung heap was a reliable indicator of how many animals a family owned—and therefore how prosperous they were. As Dr. Jones puts it, the size of your dunghill was essentially a measure of your wealth.
From asset to nuisance
As urbanization accelerated in the early modern period, the relationship between people and manure began to shift. Initially, a virtuous cycle existed between town and country: urban waste was collected and sent back to surrounding farmland as fertilizer, closing the loop between consumption and cultivation.
But as cities expanded and fewer residents maintained any connection to the land, this balance broke down. Manure transformed in the public imagination from a valuable resource into a public health hazard. The solution—underground sewerage systems—physically and psychologically severed the ancient bond between human waste and agricultural life, leaving us with the attitudes toward dung that most of us carry to this day.